Abstract

Computationally based speech speech understanding and text‐to‐speech systems require knowledge of the relation of the fundamental frequency of the speech waveform to the underlying syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the utterance. To investigate several of the many factors known to affect the fundamental‐frequency trajectory in an utterance, an extensive corpus of English sentences with varied verbal auxiliary phrases was recorded by three speakers. These phrasal units were chosen for study because they are syntactically well‐behaved and exhibit interesting fundamental‐frequency contours. Plots of these contours were obtained by computer and analyzed to discover syntactic and semantic correlations with the fundamental frequency. Sentence adverbials, negative elements, subject quantifiers, and certain modals were found to have systematic effects on the auxiliary phrasal contour. These phenomena were viewed in terms of an “operator‐nucleus” model, where the propostional, nuclear content of a sentence leads to a basic fundamental‐frequency contour, and the presence of additional sentential “operators” (such as adverbs, modals), which express the feeling of the speaker, cause specific modifications to the contour.